The Brazilian government's geographic department (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística-roughly equivalent to the U.S. Census Bureau) has compiled an fantastic interactive world factbook (available in English and Spanish as well as Portuguese). The ease of navigation allows the user to conduct a specific search of simply explore demographic, economic, environmental and development data on any country in the world.

The world, here, is literally at your fingertips. It is a simple way for anyone to locate a multitude of data about any given place around the world. It is another way that brings the whole world that much closer in this technological era.

Where in the world did Australia go?! A new cartogram by Redditer TeaDranks rescales the world’s countries according to population size instead of geographic area. Reconstructing maps based on different variables can be a powerful tool for understanding the world we live in. In this case, certain regions almost disappear from the map while others expand considerably; Canada transforms into a thin, jagged line while India now takes up a massive amount of space.

"Unfortunately, most world political maps aren't telling you the whole story. The idea that the earth's land is cleanly divvied up into nation-states - one country for each of the world's peoples - is more an imaginative ideal than a reality. Read on to learn about five ways your map is lying to you about borders, territories, and even the roster of the world's countries."

"This web mapping application provides users with a simple interface to view, customize, save and print thematic maps of the United States, using data from the 2010 Census. The beta version contains a set of 2010 Census data relating to age and sex, population and race, and family and housing in the United States by county or equivalent entity."

This month the U.S. Census Bureau has released the beta version of a very nice online mapping tool to display the 2010 data. The mapper will create PDF versions of any map produced online (file sizes from 20-55KB) and the user can export the raw data to Excel. While the user is more limited in how to display the data than they would using a GIS, this is a simple way to explore some of the basic census information.

This links to a page where tweets on Twitter are tracked in real time and displayed on a dot map.

Questions: What regions have the most tweets? Do you think there are differences between what people tweet about in one part of the world versus another? What can you infer about the areas where there are no tweets reported?

Interactive. The Global Closet Calculator aggregates the contents of your own closet by origin to generate a map showing your unique global footprint, and puts you in charge of the global journey your stuff takes to get to you.

The Brazilian government's geographic department (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística-roughly equivalent to the U.S. Census Bureau) has compiled an fantastic interactive world factbook (available in English and Spanish as well as Portuguese). The ease of navigation allows the user to conduct a specific search of simply explore demographic, economic, environmental and development data on any country in the world.

The world, here, is literally at your fingertips. It is a simple way for anyone to locate a multitude of data about any given place around the world. It is another way that brings the whole world that much closer in this technological era.

It's “back to school” time once again! K-12 and higher education faculty and those who lead informal programs are preparing for this year's geography and GIS students. Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg found several ...

I think that language and accents are part of what defines a region. Although it isn’t a physical geographical characteristic, an accent can help you to identify where you are in the world, or within a particular nation. As Americans, we hear British accents as something completely different then our own, but in reality, they aren’t that different. As the article says, even though there are distinct General American accents and the BBC English accent, there are still parts of Great Britain and part of the US that share the rhotic and non-rhotic accents.
Accents are part of the culture that defines a geographical area. I would say that accent can be both a over-arching part of culture, like, for example, the General American accent that defines the whole nation culturally, or a small part of regional culture, like, for example, the specific Boston accent.

This article brings up an interesting point on how accents within a given language can be hard to determine, and they can change drastically over time for no apparent reason. In colonial times, because most colonial settlers were English, they would obviously have similar accents to those of the British. While this is the case, over time with exposure to their own practices as well as other societies and their accents, they may have begun to slowly form their own accents. While it is obvious that “American” and “British” accents are inherently different, this was not always so. What caused this shift and when did it occur? It is hard to say, especially with how accents have continued to develop even within the classification of American or British accents. It is hard to determine what is a truly American or British accent because of the numerous regional accents that are present in today’s society. As a result, it is even more difficult to determine when the initial change in accents occurred in our past.

This is a great question because no one has really dwelled on the question. I like that the people talked about the rhotacism aspect of it because I had never known that before. This is very important because that is the exact way that the British and American languages are different. I think that it is very important to understand this subject because it shows the exact way that we speak differently from British people. I like that the people who discussed the question talked about the history that is involved, or the lack of the history that is involved. The people who truly want to study this question have to read books on this subject because it seems like there is not that much information on it. American speech sounds more modern and middle class to me, while the British language sounds like it is for the upper class.

National Geographic Education brings geography, social studies and science to life. Using real-world examples and National Geographic's rich media, educators, families, and students learn about the world and the people in it.

The viral hit isn't a fluke. South Korea has been cultivating a global music business for decades.

You may already now that I've been fascinating watching the cultural diffusion of Gangnam Style throughout the world as mentioned previously. This NPR podcast looks at the economic infrastructure of the South Korean music industry that explains in greater detail how this video went viral. The distribution of this video is dependent in part on the technological sophistication and economic strategies of South Korea to associate their brands with cultural cachet.

This NPR podcast explains the rapid diffusion of the song we all had stuck in our heads previously "Gangnam Style". South Korea invests as much as they do in there music industry as they do with their vehicle industry. Because their a small country and their music industry wants to be big, they have to get noticed outside there country. To make this work, music moguls in the country created hit factories, turning young singers into pop stars and sending them on tour around Asia. K Pop is now noticed all over the globe with songs like "Gangnam Style" which music video is one of the most viewed videos on YouTube.

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